Posted
by
kdawson
on Monday February 02, 2009 @10:37PM
from the prety-darn-fine dept.

FSFE Fellow writes "The Fellowship of the Free Software Foundation Europe is proud to announce its latest initiative: pdfreaders.org, a site providing information about PDF with links to Free Software PDF readers for all major operating systems. FSFE president Georg Greve says: 'Interoperability, competition and choice are primary benefits of Open Standards that translate into vendor-independence and better value for money for customers. Although many versions of PDF offer all these benefits for formatted text and documents, files in PDF formats typically come with information that users need to use a specific product. pdfreaders.org provides an alternative to highlight the strengths of PDF as an Open Standard.'"

I would think so, with all the FOSS ones like xPDF and (my favorite) PDF editor. Viewable GPL source code for a PDF reader (and as an added bonus, editor) to me sounds like the end of this campaign. They may not have all the functionality of Acrobat(TM), but they do most of it, contrast OO.o and MSO.

Sorry for the double post, but let me end with a shameless "what the O stands for in FOSS" plug - If you feel up to it, by all means contribute to these projects to fill in for any missing functionality between the FOSS readers/editors and Acrobat(TM). I personally have never used Acrobat(TM), as I always just export from Open Office (another prime example of FOSS PDF functionality), but for someone who may use it on a daily basis and have a decent enough knowledge of C coding/libraries could easily fill in

Other proprietary alternatives to Adobe's PDF reader also exist, but like it, their internal working is a a trade secret and these programs do not respect your right to control your own privacy and data.

Personally, I've never had a problem with Adobe Reader on any platform, and this site seems to be blatantly against it.
I just don't see the need to have a directory of PDF readers. It's easy enough to Google "open source PDF readers." There just aren't enough of them to justify a directory.

Personally, I've never had a problem with Adobe Reader on any platform

Most of us have never had a problem with it...except that it required 335 megs of disk space on Windows. 1/3 gig just to read and print PDFs? The Linux install needs only 125 megs. Why?

I just don't see the need to have a directory of PDF readers.

Either will average Joe user unless the directory puts a two-page ad [mozilla.org] in the New York Times. The only people who will know about that page are the ones who already use a non-Adobe reader! For Windows I find that Foxit suits my needs and somehow I don't feel guilty about using a proprietary reader(I use the default readers on Linux).

But PDF readers are old news...The only new thing I learned from the site is that there's a -- holy shit! -- KDE on Windows [kde.org] project!

I have student loans managed through Sallie Mae. I receive statements by email instead of paper. When I logged on, I was directed to a page that tested my ability to view PDFs. If you can't read the PDF, you must get your statements in paper. Well, I usually download PDFs and read them with SumatraPDF. It's a lovely, FOSS, very lightweight (~1 MB) PDF viewer for Windows. Unfortunately, the Sallie Mae test only checks if I can read the PDF with a browser.

Hmm, I find it's a rare and very broken PDF that Ghostscript can't render. We have tons of expensive commercial tools including Acrobat Pro that choke on significantly more files that Ghostscript, but that doesn't mean there aren't many people out there that will send out something just because it renders in acrobat reader. Do you happen to know if the 4 files have anything in common like a source program?

If Adobe shuts the doors and there's no OS implementation then that means the format slowly dies and your chances of opening the file in the distant future are diminished, if there's an OS reader then you are basically assured you will always have a way to access the files. Sure with an open spec you should be able to open the file in the future if you want to code up something to view it, but I think the MS XML spec is a nice counterpoint, there is only one real implementation so far distant opening of tho

Acrobat works ok, I suppose. It is slow to load, but the thing that keeps me from using it is the updates.

I have to reboot my Windows box to update a document viewer? I can apply an entire Office service pack without rebooting, why do I have to reboot for Acrobat?

I don't need Yahoo or Google toolbar, or whatever they are pushing in the auto-updater nowadays. I don't want your crappy "free" image editor/viewer. Every time I update it, I have to carefully read each and every screen so they don't sneak

Well, until today I've always installed Foxit on my Windows machines, wanting to have a PDF reader for the odd game manual or so but unwilling to use the attrocious and bloated Adobe Reader. Thanks to this article, however, I've found Sumatra PDF, freeing me from Foxit's ads and cluttered interface so count one convert already.

Perhaps you're right and there are too few F/OSS PDF readers to merit a specific listing of them, but maybe this would give incentive to F/OSS devs to create some more of 'em;) besid

Personally, I've never had a problem with Adobe Reader on any platform

I've had awful problems with it in Windows, historically. Hangups, slow to load, annoying default settings, crashes... Since version 9 though, it has become much more usable. Just make sure you turn off the auto update if you don't like to get nagged.:)

1. "Reverse engineering software or hardware systems which is done for the purposes of interoperability (for example, to support undocumented file formats or undocumented hardware peripherals) is mostly believed to be legal" -- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reverse_engineering [wikipedia.org]

Now if we could just get all websites to stop depending on the damn Acrobat Reader plugin. I kid you not- I have had to fight several sites we must use at work that, instead of just offering links to necessary PDF files, they check "to make sure you have the Acrobat Plugin installed" and pull some type of plugin call. Extremely annoying. Why not just point the damn link at the PDF file and let the browser decide how to handle it!!!!! Most of us *hate* the Acrobat Reader plugin, we don't WANT to have to look at a PDF file embedded into the web browser.... it is slower, less flexible, doesn't offer all the controls, often doesn't free memory after you close that "page", and doesn't allow us to use some other reader.

And if I had a dollar for every site that claims I *MUST* have Adobe Acrobat Reader in order to look at a damn PDF file, I would be rich.

It is a phenomenon whereby a person will cringe after finding out that they accidentally clicked a pdf, and now have to wait 20 seconds for adobe to load.

There's a great variation on this: before double-clicking the PDF file you want to open, you hold down 'shift' to have it skip the useless plug-in loading, but you don't notice that another file in the directory was already highlighted - depending on the number of files in the directory, you are now waiting for several dozen instances of Acrobat to load

That doesn't work on links like I am talking about. The site isn't offering a file, it is calling a plugin. That is like trying to right click on a Flash link or a Javascript link and telling it open it with something else.

Pretty much every virus infected PC I've seen in the past few months was originally infected via the magnificence that is Acrobat Reader (and most of the remainder were infected by the meth-using-crack-whore that is the Sun JRE)

The time is right to go after Acrobat. After explaining to someone that the virus that just trashed their PC (or office's PCs) came in by way of a hidden PDF in an infected web page, not only are they OK with removing the Acrobat browser plugins, but they're often open to getting Acrobat off the machine entirely.

Given the rash of shit that Microsoft has (rightfully) received over the years for browser exploits, it's time to hold Adobe and Sun accountable for their dangerously insecure products. Both companies patch management is terrible. Neither provide any decent support for sysadmins to push out updates ("uh, try to find the MSI that the installer drops and then, you know, push it out with something. I think you can do it with Group Policies!" is about as far as they go) For Java it's been easy to say "just get rid of it" since for 99% of people it's unnecessary, but Acrobat and Acrobat Reader have been more of a challenge. Perhaps highlighting how insecure Acrobat is will help move the effort to replace it along.

Pretty much every virus infected PC I've seen in the past few months was originally infected via the magnificence that is Acrobat Reader... by way of a hidden PDF in an infected web page.

That's spot-on. I'm like much of the Slashdot crowd (or so I suppose): using the Internet since well before the turn of the millenium, tried all kinds of OSs, a bit of a hardware geek, etc. Yet I was casually surfing along with my work laptop (yay, with McAfee Enterprise)on some humor/satire related website when everything in my browser froze up. The moment the browser recovered, I was told there was an error in acrobat.exe; the next three minutes were a blur of virus/trojans/backdoor alerts from McAfee

Pretty much every virus infected PC I've seen in the past few months was originally infected via the magnificence that is Acrobat Reader (and most of the remainder were infected by the meth-using-crack-whore that is the Sun JRE)

The time is right to go after Acrobat. After explaining to someone that the virus that just trashed their PC (or office's PCs) came in by way of a hidden PDF in an infected web page, not only are they OK with removing the Acrobat browser plugins, but they're often open to getting Acrobat off the machine entirely.

Given the rash of shit that Microsoft has (rightfully) received over the years for browser exploits, it's time to hold Adobe and Sun accountable for their dangerously insecure products. Both companies patch management is terrible. Neither provide any decent support for sysadmins to push out updates ("uh, try to find the MSI that the installer drops and then, you know, push it out with something. I think you can do it with Group Policies!" is about as far as they go) For Java it's been easy to say "just get rid of it" since for 99% of people it's unnecessary, but Acrobat and Acrobat Reader have been more of a challenge. Perhaps highlighting how insecure Acrobat is will help move the effort to replace it along.

What version of Sun JRE was running? I haven't heard of any viruses with Sun Java in years.

Um, Adobe not only gets you a way to get to the MSI, but it actually creates a customization file for you. That solution is called Adobe Customization Wizard 9 [adobe.com]. Sun JRE has been a bit more of a pain in the rear, especially when it comes to making sure ONLY the version(s) you want are installed and registered.

>> it's time to hold Adobe and Sun accountable for their dangerously insecure products>> Neither provide any decent support for sysadmins to push out updates

Correct. It's stupid that the JRE tries to autoupdate by default on startup, annoying users that just use it for executing some REAL application... In the other side, the last week I tried to use the Adobe flash 10 plugin inside an intranet (without internet access, by first installing the last plugin.EXE) and IE simply crashed on the firs

Pretty much every virus infected PC I've seen in the past few months was originally infected via the magnificence that is Acrobat Reader (and most of the remainder were infected by the meth-using-crack-whore that is the Sun JRE)

Really?

Because stupid users are still at the top of my list. If you want to count technological infection vectors then for the last month 1. Windows RPC vulnerability (MS08-67), mostly on home PC's that weren't patched. 2. IE, drive by infections are common, falls victim to viru

Generally tracking things back to the original infection vector is fairly straight forward if it happened recently - there's usually cruft all over the system that wasn't there prior to the infection, and log file entries or application crash me

As someone who really loves to play around with LaTeX, it really irritates me when features in my document can't be seen and tested in anything other than Adobe. There are so many neat things out there (like PDF javascript) but they're just not implemented... It's sad...

They're promoting other options for software. This can be labeled silly or not so interesting, however I think it's great that there are people passionate about something. And put time and energy in putting up a site listing alternatives.

Actually I think it's a great idea, which could be used for lots of other software categories like word processing, image editing, mail clients et cetera.

Except that the entire mess with Free Software PDF readers can be laid entirely at the door of the FSF. Here's a brief history:

In the beginning, there was xpdf. It was okay. It displayed PDFs and was quite lightweight. It was released under the FSF's favourite license, the GPL. This was fine, but the UI used a really old toolkit, so people decided they wanted to take the PDF rendering code and put it in something a bit more modern.

It often produces much smaller compressed files (typically about half the size of a PDF), and
there are open source viewers for many platforms. It has plenty of support for annotations, OCR, internal links etc just like PDF, and you can extract the parts and structure of a Djvu document in XML with command line tools and modify them easily.

It's also very easy to cut a Djvu document into individual pages, which lets you publish big documents on websites so that users only need to download the actual pages that they are interested in reading (eg if they want to preview the file without downloading the whole thing). This saves bandwidth, user waiting time, etc.

Last but not least, the Djview viewer renders pages much faster than Acrobat or Xpdf in my experience - so much faster that I regularly get annoyed at the sloness of flipping pages in PDF format. The first thing I do with any paper in PDF format is to convert it using pdf2djvu.

Oh, one advantage of PDF is that everyone else is currently using it,
therefore you won't annoy people by making them download and install new
programs to do something (read) that they can do with the software they
have... only because you want to use an obscure format type.

Who's annoying whom? Personally, I wouldn't bother with the commercial software you linked to, as Debian has plenty of free tools for handling PDF files already, but if you feel it's worth bringing to slashdotters' attention, great!

The point of Djvu is that it's technically slightly better than PDF for digital document storage and viewing, and since it's free(libre) (<= note relevance to TFA), people who want a small competitive advantage can try it out without risk, now or in ten years or whenever. I happen to like it (not that I'm anyone special), but so do various libraries which tend to think in longer terms than the next year. And of course, the format was developed at AT&T Labs to address digital archiving problems.

BTW, you don't need to keep all your documents in the format you receive them just so other people can read them. That kind of thinking will just make you buy useless copies of Microsoft Office and whatnot, on the off chance that someone else can't find the import command. Always use the best tool for the job, and convert your work to something basic when you need to interoperate.

I did my taxes today on my Mac. Filled my 1040 in Preview. Worked great. Saved and everything. Until I entered my bank info. It seems that the 1040 uses some text spacing feature that Preview doesn't support.

So . . . I fired up Acrobat and re-did the whole thing. (Acrobat couldn't save the PDF once it was edited in Preview. Once I figure out the labyrinthine Apple bug reporting system I'll report both of these problems.)

Right or wrong, people only check their documents with Acrobat. It is the de fac

I read a lot of PDF files on my Mac and work and it has been my experience that the "native" PDF plugin (which really isn't, in older versions of the OS it was called the "SchubertIT" plugin) is inferior to Acrobat's reader (I believe I am using version 7-8, not at work so can't check.) Also using X 10.4 so maybe it's better in 10.5.

On my iMac (one of the last PowerPC models shipped) the Adobe version is faster, renders text and documents more accurately and more quickly, and is more accurate when selectin

Other proprietary alternatives to Adobe's PDF reader also exist, but like it, their internal working is a a trade secret and these programs do not respect your right to control your own privacy and data.

A tad melodramatic, isn't it? Ooh, scary secret internal workings... I don't think this is going to increase adoption rates of FOSS PDF readers one bit, and for one simple reason.

No one cares. Sure, maybe a few people do, but the VAST majority of people really couldn't care less if their PDF reader is free as in speech, so long as its free as in beer. They're gonna google "free pdf reader", find Adobe's and use that. Or, if they really don't like Adobe (who could blame them?), they'll see Foxit next on the list, and use that.

If you want to get people to switch, you need your product to be substantially superior in terms of features, not philosophy. Packaging it with something people already have would also be a good method. If there was a PDF reader good enough to be packaged with OOo, that'd be a start.

*Yeah, I know I'll probably get modded down for daring to use FOSS and FUD in the same breath, but come on! That description was so over the top*

See Spazimodo's comment above for the security risks involved in using Adobe's proprietary comment.

The argument you're making - that ppl will switch for pragmatic rather than philosophical reasons - is an old one. The free software community will counter with the argument that their philosophical reasons are entirely pragmatic. Ours is simply more long term pragmatic thinking. The benefits of the founding of the Free Software Foundation 25 years ago are increasingly showing manifest benefits today. Why do you have an issue with people expressing broader and longer term thinking?

And how many people do you think will bother reading the entire website instead of just the column labeled "Windows"? If you're the type that reads the entire website instead of going straight to the "Download" link, you're the type that needs to know the practical problems of using propietary software but for most people you could probably put "I love child porn!" in there and it wouldn't affect the downloads one bit.

But what about PDF editors? And I don't mean things like OpenOffice that can output its native format into PDF outputs (but can't open the PDFs and edit them) or any similar program on Mac OS X able to print anything to PDF. I mean something that can open and edit a PDF file generated by some other tool where you don't have the original source (or there is none in the case of a scanner scanning to PDF). I mean Adobe Acrobat replacements. Not Acroba

PDF is not intended as a format for editing. It is an electronic form of paper. If you want an editable document, use a file format designed for editing. If you export your source document as PDF and then import it in something else, you will lose information (unless you do tricks like embed the source document in the PDF metadata).

This is exactly what users don't want ! Sure I could do it (and have, and it's a major pain in my ass), but boss man sure as hell isn't going to start messing around with hand-editing ps files (on command the line, no less !), and neither is any non-programmer/sysadmin in the company.

FOSS needs to offer at the very least parity with closed source in terms of usability if it's going to get anywhere. Firefox didn't get to where it's at by simply being libre, it got there by offering a better user experience

I download Adobe Reader for Linux because some documents can only be seen like they were meant to be seen in it. But I avoid using the.tar.gz installer script: I usually download the.deb, unpack it manually instead of installing it and copy the folder to the/opt limbo. Then I use it only when I really really need it. I don't even bother in creating a link to the binary in/usr/local/bin or something. I keep it hard to use.

Why? Not because it's proprietary, not because I'm a FOSS zealot. Just because it's

Whenever the Adobe Reader (or Acrobat Pro for that matter) is brought into a Slashdot discussion, people invaribaly mention the fact that it insists on checking for updates, which is completely true. It's a pain, and some people also use it as an example of what they hate about Windows.

However, what I'm more surprised about is that a bunch of geeks aren't capable of exploring the options of the update applet:

* Run Adobe Reader/Acrobat Pro, click Help menu -> Check for updates...* Let it perform a scan, then regardless of whether it found anything to update or not, click Preferences when it appears, and uncheck the "Automatically check for Adobe updates" checkbox.* Click OK, let it scan again for some reason, then hit Quit. Now it will never bother you again.

Now of course, the default should be for updates to NOT be automatically installed. If necessary it should perform scans by default, but have the update notification unobtrusive, like a little icon in the main GUI for example.

Anyway, I provide these instructions because even though we're supposedly a site full of high-intellect individuals, I continually see this complaint and wonder why people can't just try to solve the problem themselves, either through poking with the options like every geek should (it's fun to explore stuff, isn't it?), or simply Googling for an answer.

Whenever the Adobe Reader (or Acrobat Pro for that matter) is brought into a Slashdot discussion, people invaribaly mention the fact that it insists on checking for updates, which is completely true. It's a pain, and some people also use it as an example of what they hate about Windows.

However, what I'm more surprised about is that a bunch of geeks aren't capable of exploring the options of the update applet:

Tried out Sumatra. I see it doesn't display text I've added with a PDF editor, or highlights I've done, or call-out boxes. Are those features not part of the general PDF spec? Either way, it kind of sucks that someone could open one of these PDFs in Sumatra and not see all sorts of commentary someone else intended, which can be seen if opening the file in Foxit or Adobe Reader for example...

I prefer free software most of the time anyway, but it is astounding how bad Adobe's Acrobat Reader has become.

On Linux, I now use/usr/bin/xpdf on all PDFs by default: it's ugly, but it is incredibly fast to open, and has worked for every document so far.

On Mac OS X, I continue to be impressed with how good the built-in Preview app really is. I've never had a reason to use anything else.

Acrobat Reader 7 on Solaris was so bulky, slow, and full of Annoying Flashy Ads (TM), that I actually kept around an older version (5.0.9) of acroread in order to have better performance and a less irritating GUI.

PDF is, and has always been, a published standard that is royalty-free to download and implement for any purpose. I have been using pdflatex for ages to generate PDFs directly from LaTeX documents. These can be sent directly to the printers and no formatting will be lost.

You are possibly confusing it with Flash, where the specification used to be only available for implementing Flash creators, not Flash players.

All of the software on that web page is free. But I wonder how many of them reproduce the obnoxious feature of Acrobat that it won't let you print certain documents - with no way to override that. If I were the FSFE, I would promote only PDF readers that respect the user's rights (as fair use) to make printed copies of documents, and don't replicate the Adobe DRM.

Linux and OSX seem to have decent free PDF readers. It's only Windows that is lacking.

Only if you pretend that readers like Foxit (and a few other lesser-known ones) don't exist. Given the choice between Foxit and having to install KDE for Windows to run Ocular (good grief, how can PDFReaders.org even list that as a serious proposition?) I'll take Foxit any day. Sadly, it seems to be slowly succumbing to the Acrobat bloat effect, but it's still generally usable.

We use a thin environment; and even though it is under Linux, we don't want to pull in all of KDE for Ocular, etc. We need tight control over the apps, and prefer ones without "tendrils" into other stuff.

Two problems: first, Foxit isn't Free Software, which I imagine is a huge problem for the Free Software Foundation Europe. And second, Foxit sucks, not only does it have *ads* (c'mon, even Opera took them out and they were far less annoying), but the interface is a cluttered, incoherent mess and the fact that I still used it until today is only a testament to how pathetically bad Adobe Reader is, not to any quality of Foxit.

The gaudy interfaces of most FOSS software(like Sumatra) will frighten most sheeple away

No, most people use Adobe because they don't know they have a choice and many stick with Adobe because rationalising the familiar is easy. For most people, they wouldn't notice if their adobe was replaced by Sumatra or Foxit, which I have recently abandoned for SumatraPDF due to a flashing ad banner, admittedly for foxit's paid product, I wouldn't have minded but if it didn't flash and distract me from what I am doing.

Disk space is dirt cheap. That is less than a penny of disk space. Looking over my Reader directory, there is about 32 megs of localization resources. 2 megs of fonts. 40 megs of plugins. 102 megs of setup files so you can repair/change the installation. The actual core binaries seem to be under 5 megs.

There is probably a good reason these are so large anyway--developer time is vastly more expensive than disk space and PDF is a pretty complex beast.